In general, speech recognition is the process of converting acoustic signal into a linguistic message. In certain applications, for example where a speech recognition processor serves as a user interface to a database query system, the resulting message may need to contain enough information to reliably communicate a speaker's goal in accessing the database. However, in an application such as automated dictation or computer data entry, it may be necessary that the resulting message represents a verbatim transcription of a sequence of spoken words. In either case, an accurate statistical, or stochastic, language model is desirable for successful recognition.
Stochastic language modeling places such a role in large vocabulary speech recognition in which it is typically used to constrain the acoustic analysis, guide the search through various (partial) text hypothesis, and/or contribute to the determination of the final transcription. Statistical language models using both syntactic and semantic information have been developed. This approach embeds latent semantic analysis (LSA), which is used to capture meaningful word associations in the available context of a document, into standard n-gram paradigm, which relies on the probability of occurrence in the language of all possible strings of N words.
This new class of language models, referred to as (multi-span) hybrid N-gram plus LSA models have shown a substantial reduction in perplexity. In addition, multi-span models have also been shown to significantly reduce word error rate. However, their overall performance tends to be sensitive to a number of factors. One such factor is the training data used to derive the statistical parameters, in particular those associated with the LSA component. This problem is common in statistical language modeling and can be solved by careful matching or training and test conditions. In addition, a dynamic selection of the LSA context scope during recognition affects the overall effectiveness of the hybrid models.